Jen Julian

Every week, a beautiful lady who looks like me comes into the shop. Or rather, she’s beginning to look like me, like a fancy version of me, because every time she comes in some piece of her face has changed. And I have studied her face, believe me. I know the shape of her nostrils, the peach fuzz gleam on the side of her jaw, the little crease on her bottom lip where a crescent of pearly lip gloss shines like a tiny moon. I don’t know how or why this is happening, but all these features have been shifting to make her face look more like mine, and it might be that I’m starting to look more like her, too.

In the end, this could work to my advantage, because Luke, the college kid who works with me at the shop, is in love with this lady, and I am in love with Luke, and if the lady and I become indistinguishable that puts us one step closer together.

I’m alright with getting Luke in a roundabout way. I have no pride when it comes to that.

Today, which is Friday, the lady arrives around 11:00 a.m. like usual. She’s wearing a coral jumpsuit that matches our aprons, her hair pulled back in a lacy white scarf. She looks like one of the confections in our bakery case, a raspberry petit four.

“Do you want to hear the joke of the day?” I ask.

“Why not,” the lady says. “Let me hear it.”

“I don’t know,” she says. “What is the sweetest farm animal?”

Luke pleads, “Krista, don’t,” but there’s no stopping me:

-ha.” The lady’s laugh is bright and shiny, like a jewel. “That’s good. I’ll remember that one.”

She laughs again. “Two profiteroles, please.”

Luke boxes them for her, moving stiff like a little robot, and I watch her hands as they extract her credit card. Her fingers are bare except for one silver band on her pinky. My fingers are crowded with rings, an assortment of cheap stones and metals that are meant to improve my luck and confidence. When I take the card, I hold her gaze. I feel something moving between us, little air particles carrying a mix-and-match of difference and sameness. Does she feel it too?

When she’s gone, I turn and see that Luke’s ears are so red they’re almost purple. I love that. I love messing with him.

Luke doesn’t notice what I notice about the lady, the transformation, the shifting features. She and I are too different in his eyes. I’m shorter, for one, and broke, for another, and this lady is, to him, a paradigm of sophistication. She can’t be much older than me, thirty at most, but I seem younger because I’m a college dropout who works the counter at a patisserie, and I live with my folks in a room above their garage, and when Ray, the owner, thunders in like a god to bark about a mess we left or an order we fucked up, I salute and shout “Aye, sir,” like I don’t have a care. Charm alone was what got me through high school. I was, still am, a sterling sweetheart. My older sister by comparison got her master’s in business right before the 2008 financial crisis, specializing in 

As for the lady, I don’t know what her job is specifically, but she works at an art gallery downtown. I know this because I once followed her on my lunch break when I went out to get burritos for Luke and me. I didn’t mean to follow her. I realized I was behind her car at the light heading out of the shopping center, and my steering wheel just kind of turned by itself. Soon, I found myself parallel parked on her work street, watching her eat lunch with a female coworker in a marble courtyard. They were both eating something noodly and colorless from Tupperware containers, but the two éclairs the lady had bought that day never appeared. What did she do with them? Was the second éclair for somebody else, or were they both for her?

Luke is sure she’s seeing someone. He laments to me about it all the time.

“Not like it matters. I’d never have a chance with her anyway.”

“You’re insane,” he says. “There’s no way.”

We’re having a luxurious coffee break, our second of the afternoon since Ray left early to go watch his daughter do karate. Overall, you could say I’m a lazy worker. A bad influence.

“One day,” I say, “I’ll ask her myself.”

He says, “If you did that, I would die.”

I am in love with Luke’s sad, straight eyebrows, the little flame of his mouth. Maybe he would die. Maybe that last shock would destroy him, my poor nervous boy. He is so terrified of his future. Like me, he lives with his parents, and while they have no money, they do have stratospheric expectations and a strict, unimaginative vision of success. As he explains it, he will either save their souls or be cast out among the rabble.

Nowadays, he spends most of his time chewing his nails to the nub, making his cuticles bleed. But I’m into that. I want to put his fingers in my mouth and taste the iron in his blood. Something tells me he doesn’t get enough Vitamin C, that he wakes up in the middle of the night, heart pounding.

Sometimes, I really do like working at the shop. I think the word “shopgirl” is classy as fuck. I like how Ray keeps saying, “I should fire you. The only thing you ever do is flirt with that college kid all day,” and, “If you take another two-hour lunch break, I’ll fire you,” and, “If I hear you singing ‘Yakety Yak’ as you’re taking out the trash, which is a song that I hate, and which you know that I hate, I’ll fire you.” But he won’t fire me. Firstly, I flirt with everyone—women, men, coworkers, customers, health inspectors, delivery people, lonely people, hungry people—and that’s good for business. Secondly, we have a rapport, Ray and me.

Three days a week, Ray comes in at 5:00am to make mille-feuilles. Sometimes, I come in early so that I can help him decorate. I said earlier that he would thunder through the shop like a god, and he is a god, really, because baking is worldbuilding. Baking is an ongoing invention of cream clouds and hillsides and ridges, foamy egg swells, starry gem mines, emeralds and rubies, fragrant sugar mists the color of Easter. Ray likes to decorate the mille-feuilles on theme. This week, it’s Fantasy, meringue dragons, gold and fire made of sugar glass, marshmallow toadstools capped with gold leaf. Always, the mille-feuilles are so meticulous and beautiful it’s hard to imagine eating them, which makes them hard to sell.

I watch Ray decorate with my chin on my hands.

“When are you going to teach me your secrets, Ray?”

“Hm,” he says, hunched over, deeply focused. He’s a huge guy. I think before this he was a bounty hunter, a mafia man.

“Ray, when are you going to retire so I can inherit the shop?”

At this he looks up, his red face blank as an almond. “Retire? I can’t retire. I can’t afford to retire. I’ll be working here until I’m dead. Even after I’m dead, I’ll be doing exactly what I’m doing now. Just prop me up with a stick or something. I’ll keep going.”

My rapport with Ray is this: I won’t say, “I’ve been working here three years, Ray. When am I getting a raise?” and he won’t say, “What are you doing here?” and I won’t say “Well, my prospects are thin right now, but at least my heart is pure,” and he won’t say, “No, what are you doing here 

? Your shift doesn’t start for another two hours.” At the best times, we regard each other with silence. We each know exactly who the other is.

The lady who looks like me comes in and buys two pistachio cannoli, two brandy-soaked clafoutis, two fruit tarts crowned in electric-green kiwi. She gets a haircut. Now her hair is shoulder-length like mine. Her teeth look smaller. Every time she hands me her credit card, we seem to trade a little bit more. My hair gets shiny. My nails get strong.

“Thanks, beautiful.”	“You’re welcome, mon chéri.”

I imagine Ray, dead and deified in all his cosmic glory, decorating mille-feuilles until the end of time. I imagine the lady who looks like me taking home all his sweets and hoarding them in her house like a dragon, a seeping pile, a riverflow of caramel and cream.

I would’ve invited Luke to go with me, but he’s having some kind of breakdown and won’t leave the house. And he probably would’ve lost his mind here anyway, seeing the lady outside his natural habitat of the shop. The gallery is a chilly space of glass and cement and exposed air ducts. There is an elaborate installation piece, a rope woven out of crimson fabric. It slices the entryway in half, tucks around a doorway, zigzags through an adjacent exhibit room. In one corner, toward the ceiling, the rope is threaded around the rungs of a kitchen chair; in another, it creates a web, a dreamcatcher shape filled with shards of glass. Sometimes, the rope is thin as a finger, and sometimes it’s fat and clotted, and in some places bits of it have become unwoven and loop to the floor like a curtain. Among the crimson fabric are little blue and white and yellow threads that resemble veins and fat, which makes the whole project look like the disemboweling of a giant animal.

I don’t like this kind of art, but I find myself following the rope anyway, tracing its path through a series of exhibit rooms. The rope winds along, entrapping a dining room set, a crib, the eye sockets of a cow’s skull, all suspended as if the room were in freefall. Eventually, I hear someone calling from behind me—“Hey”—and I see the lady who looks like me, waving me down. “Hey there.”

My face sparks with panic. I worry she’s onto me, that she saw me spying on her in the courtyard all those weeks ago, that it’s weird for a girl in a patisserie to visit a customer’s place of business. But then I remember that I’m not a girl in a patisserie right now, just a visitor at an art gallery. And anyway, she seems happy to see me.

“Bonjour. I almost didn’t recognize you without the apron.”

“Yeah, fortunately, when we’re not on the clock our boss lets us wear civvies.”

-ha,” she says, laughing her bright laugh. Today she’s wearing a red poncho-type-thing and earrings made of knotted thread: chunky multicolored strands that hang down to her collarbone. Two ceramic dice, studded with gold, dangle at the end of each strand.

“Oh, thank you. We sell them at the gallery shop. The woman who makes them is one of our artists—Marian Babbage—” She gestures solicitously to the red rope. “This is her installation. I see you’ve been following it around.”

“I have. I don’t know if I get it though.”

I do. I can’t turn her down. She leads me into a small dark room, crisscrossed with angular track lighting. The rope ends at the left-hand sleeve of a long red coat—or rather, the rope 

 a coat, bulging and heavy-looking and bloody with loose threads. The coat hangs on a mannequin, and there it resembles an enormous, shaggy heart. In the dim light, it almost appears to be pulsing.

“I know, right,” the lady says. She stands close to me, close enough that I’d be able to smell if there were sweets on her breath. Nothing sweet, but something smoky: sage, incense. “The installation is over two miles of rope, all woven by hand. Dyed jute and linen, shredded silk. The coat alone took a year to assemble.” She sighs, as if taking a year to make a coat is romantic. Then she looks at me: “Would you like to wear it?”

“Wear it? Like, take it off the mannequin?”

“Sure. The artist indicated, as part of the project, that she wanted some of our visitors to wear it.”

“You just let random people try it on?”

The lady shrugs and steps around me. “It’s not random.”

With some effort, she lifts the coat off the mannequin and settles it down onto my shoulders. It feels more like a cape, even when I’ve worked my arms into the sleeves. The woven rope is absurdly, dramatically heavy, its coarse threads itchy against my skin. The lady wraps the coat tighter around me to hide my T-shirt, and I realize it smells like soil, like fertilizer.

“I feel like a giant bird,” I say, which is a lie. In fact, the coat makes me feel like a small, stuck thing, a worm in a cocoon.

She nudges me toward a sharp triangle of light. Once she has me lined up where she wants, she extracts a thin digital camera from her pocket and aims it at me. Again: a sparky panic. I hold up my arms. The coat sleeves hang on them like saddlebags.

“Oh, sorry,” she says, but her apology shows a glint of impatience. “You don’t want your picture taken? I should’ve mentioned—”

The trade between us, the mix-and-match of particles I’ve been feeling every time we see each other—it seems unbalanced now. I intuit that a picture will make it worse. But also, I feel stupid denying her. Ungrateful, even. What were her criteria, choosing me?

“You don’t have to smile,” she says. “Just be natural. Maybe lower your head a little.”

She holds up the camera and I stare at her straight-on. The track lighting makes pointed shadows on her face, and she still looks like me, but she also doesn’t. She also looks like a painting, a composite of dark shapes, alive and shifting, her heavy, dangling earrings like drippage, like acetone smears. My chest burns inside the coat.

I will think later that I should’ve flung the coat off and let it slump on the floor. I will fantasize about knives and matches. But in the moment, I allow the lady to remove it from me and return it reverently to the mannequin. I feel scraped, like a scab. I don’t know how else to describe it. I want to even us out again, the lady and me. I want to smoosh her face with my fingers until she looks like neither one of us. The lady is oblivious to this. Or not. Maybe she’s ignoring my obvious want. She looks at the camera and smiles, her hair glowing with a halo of light.

“That’s a good one,” she says. “I’m happy with that.”

It’s Friday again and Luke isn’t here. He hasn’t been to work in four days. In the kitchen, Ray gets off the phone with someone, Luke himself, or maybe his mom or dad, and Ray, in his fury, flings his KitchenAid paddle into the sink. A spume of cake batter erupts across the counter.

“Krista, call Dee to see if she can fill in. That twerpy little college shit is leaving us high and dry again. God damn it.”

Some of the cake batter has splattered on me, beading in my arm hair like whiteheads.

“Wah, wah,” says Ray, marching past me. “Cry me a river.”

I call after his retreating back: “Jesus, Ray, would you stop being bigdick boss man for one second and be a human and have some compassion for a person who’s going through a hard time? We’re all doing our best here, Ray. We’re all trying not to screw up. We don’t wake up in the morning and think, ‘Gee, I hope I can screw up today and let Ray down. That’s my favorite thing to do.’ For God’s sake, you think people think like that?”

Ray turns and looks at me. For a moment, he stands red-faced and blinking over a tray of madeleines. “I am human,” he mumbles, like he’s testing how that sounds. Then, louder: “I 

human. Just because I’m not your dad or your preacher or your guidance counselor doesn’t mean I’m not human. I’m trying to run a fucking business here.”

He shoves the madeleines into the oven and goes on muttering to himself.

“Be a human. You be a goddamn human and show up to work like an adult.”

This week, the mille-feuille theme is Murder, spiky chocolate tuiles so dark they’re nearly black, glazes of pomegranate and blood orange, the cutting board like a crime scene. It signals that Ray might be going through a hard time himself, but I know better than to ask questions.

Dee comes in to take over Luke’s shift. She is a butch fifty-three-year-old woman with a huge, serious face. She has several jobs like this across town and has been working all of them for too long. When we work together, we stand tensely behind the bakery case like soldiers on watch, arms behind our backs. Customers come and go, same faces, same clothes, voices blurring like the warm hum of an engine. The confections in the case glow with witchery, a sugar glamor. Kids smudge their pale hands against the glass and weep with longing. Wah wah.

At 11:00am, the lady who looks like me comes in wearing a white lace blouse and a peasant skirt, and she has on those same earrings, the dice dangling goldly on their ropes. She grins at me—“Bonjour”—and I try my best to grin back. A jolt of heat leaps into my throat.

“These look exquisite,” she says, examining Ray’s mille-feuilles.

“Yeah,” I say. “Our boss puts special effort into them.”

“I don’t even know if I could eat them. They’re too perfect.”

“We have madeleines,” Dee announces sternly, as if the lady and I are wasting time. True, the shop is busy today. The line is pressing up against the door. “Lavender. Also, orange.”

The lady gives Dee a close-mouthed smile and turns back to me.

“Full disclosure,” she whispers, “I’m actually good on sweets today. I came by to tell you that we’ve hung the pictures from Marian’s installation. You should come see yours. I think the outcome will be interesting.”

She’s close enough that I can smell her incense breath. The pearly crescent on her bottom lip stretches as she speaks.

Jen Julian

Jen Julian

Fiction

Spring 2023 - Decoy

Sweet Girl